Not just a dumb blonde

THERE is a sequence in Terry Johnson’s play Insignificance in which “Marilyn Monroe” demonstrates her understanding of the theory of relativity to “Albert Einstein”. It is a fantasy encounter but that is not to say it couldn’t have happened.

Characterised throughout her brief life as a dumb blonde, Marilyn was neither. While Johnson’s play provided an amusing corrective to the received wisdom that she was just a supernaturally photogenic, over-sexed bimbo it is rooted in some thorough research into a woman whose brain was far more impressive than her other assets.

Now, 50 years almost to the day that she died (August 5, 1962), female cultural commentators are falling over themselves to claim Marilyn as a shining example of a proto-feminist who challenged the status quo and ended up a sacrificial victim; a sex bomb hoist by her own petard. She played the part of the bubble-head so convincingly people mistook it for the truth.

“I’ve never fooled anyone,” she said. “I’ve let people fool themselves. They didn’t bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn’t.”

On the 50th anniversary of her death, Marilyn Monroe is recast as a deep-thinking feminist icon who hid her intellect to secure fame

It is not the first time that a star has been hijacked by the women’s groups and exploited for propaganda.

It wasn’t so long ago that Doris Day became a poster girl for second-generation feminists decades after she played a fluffy virgin attempting to escape the clutches of seducer Rock Hudson.

But Marilyn is different. As depicted by Lois Banner in her new book The Passion And The Paradox and by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, she is a woman who lacked education but possessed enough native intelligence to want to improve herself.

She associated with people who were better read than she was and amassed 400 books. As Dowd has written: “Marilyn Monroe aspired to be smarter than she was.”

It is the evidence of this aspiration that marks her out. Of course, it is possible to overstate the case, to portray Marilyn as a closet intellectual, but this would be to peddle a fantasy just as vacuous as that of the dumb blonde.

As one blogger wrote on a fan website: “There was a whole lot of laughable revisionist history going on regarding Monroe’s intellect in the years following her tragic death. The woman may have tried to learn and expand her horizons but to suddenly pretend she was some great, deep and insightful thinker is simply ludicrous.”

YET Marilyn was an intellectual wannabe and probably imagined that by associating with intellectuals some of their “smarts” might rub off on her. If that could be achieved through sex, so be it.

She once said she’d like to go to bed with Einstein but although she corresponded with him it is unlikely they had a physical relationship.

But she did hang around with such literary heavyweights as Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen and Arthur Miller – whom she married. Miller and Bellow thought she was poetic.

In 2010 a previously unseen selection of her jottings was published.

Edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters By Marilyn Monroe, gives some insight into her literacy and state of mind.

Although she was often asked by photographers to pose with a book as if “suddenly” caught in the act of reading James Joyce or Dostoyevsky, they were more than just props. She was reading them.

“We worked on a beach on Long Island,” photographer Eve Arnold wrote. “I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up… She kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it but she found it hard going… When we stopped at a local playground to photograph, she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.”

In her diary and poems, Marilyn reveals a young woman for whom writing was the means to discover who she was and understand her turbulent emotional life.

Not that she got any credit for her intellect. Michelle Morgan, who wrote Marilyn Monroe: Private And Undisclosed, said: “She played ditzy blondes and for some reason people believed that was the person she was but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. It’s intriguing that she seems to be one of the only actresses who people confuse with her parts. People believed she was a joke but she was always trying to better herself.”

Marilyn had an IQ of 163 and at a lunch thrown for Dinesen by novelist Carson McCullers she was described as “gay and witty in this company, easily holding her own”.

She was friends with Capote and met novelist Bellow, who wrote that she “conducts herself like a philosopher.

She was connected with a very powerful current but couldn’t disconnect herself from it.”

BUT she was also an astute businesswoman and had a production company. She bought the film rights to two plays,Bus Stop and The Sleeping Prince (later The Prince And The Showgirl).

When asked about her role as movie producer, she replied: “I feel wonderful. I’m incorporated.”

Marilyn was dyslexic and bipolar yet she was not unaware of her problems and explored psychoanalysis.

But whatever demons haunted her, the spirit of intellectual enquiry never abandoned her.

Susan Strasberg, daughter of her acting coach Lee Strasberg, said: “When she wasn’t an expert on a subject but wanted to be, she got hold of someone and picked their brains… She collected experts, one on the stock market, one on poetry, one on the world situation.”

As Lois Banner concludes: “These are not the habits of a vapid woman. The realisation that one has more to learn and the thirst for knowledge are the hallmarks of the most intelligent. She may not have had formal schooling but Marilyn was a woman not only self-educated but brilliantly so.”

OTHER BEAUTIES WITH BRAINS by Georgia Galton Ayling

PIN-UP Hedy Lamarr, best known for her racy sex scenes in the controversial 1933 film Ecstasy, was a mathematical prodigy. She pioneered the process of “frequency hopping”, which was a way of making radio-guided torpedoes harder for the enemy to detect or jam during the Second World War.

This technology is the basis of today’s wireless communication.

Geena Davis, who starred in such Eighties’ films as The Fly and Beetlejuice, was not only a semi-finalist in America’s Olympic archery team but is also a member of Mensa who speaks fluent Swedish and plays the piano, organ and flute.

Another woman of many talents is Natalie Portman, Oscar-winning star of 2010’s Black Swan. After securing a place at Harvard, she graduated with a degree in psychology and is fluent in Hebrew, Japanese and French.

And last but not least, Britain’s favourite television presenter Carol Vorderman is even brighter than she is given credit for. The Countdown star became a member of Mensa after studying engineering at Cambridge University and her aptitude for maths helped to land her the role in the cult show which she co-anchored to great acclaim from 1982 to 2008.